Science —

Ex-astronauts plan to launch an asteroid-tracking satellite

NASA vets trash their former bosses, seek funding, and hint at lucrative mining.

B612 Foundation representative Bill Anders stands in front of the famed "Earthrise" photo he took during his mission on Apollo 8 while announcing his new group's efforts to launch an asteroid-detecting satellite. He's joined by fellow B612 Foundation leaders and ex-astronauts Thomas Jones (left) and Ed Lu (right).

On Tuesday, with Earth Day as a backdrop, the B612 Foundation started its presentation about asteroid detection with enough material to fill out an apocalyptic sci-fi film. An introductory video mapped out 26 nuclear-bomb-level impacts recorded on Earth in the last 13 years, a few of which were measured as larger than the one that leveled Hiroshima. After that, a supplementary video showed thousands of dots whirling around the Solar System like fireflies, each dot representing an asteroid that has been tracked by NASA. "There are at least 100 times as many [asteroids] out there," B612 reps said.

Next to the projector's screen sat a cardboard kiosk with a grotesque image: an asteroid about to crash into a giant football stadium. Earth Day? More like Kiss-Earth-Goodbye Day!

“The current strategy to deal with asteroid impacts is blind luck,” former NASA astronaut Dr. Ed Lu said, hinting at a lack of effort from NASA and other space agencies. “But we can change that.”

Thus began his appeal to the public to contribute to his new major venture: a privately funded satellite, dubbed Sentinel, that will glide through the Solar System to find and track as many asteroids as possible. With that information in hand, governments and/or private companies, alike, could begin sending out “small robot” missions to nudge destructive asteroids out of Earth’s range.

What we can't see can hurt us

The B612 team obtained the data about recent asteroid impacts from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Detection Network, a sensor collection group dedicated to tracking nuclear explosions; it gathered data on asteroid impacts because they're largely similar.

After reviewing that data, B612 found that current asteroid-detection tech is best at spotting asteroids at least 1 kilometer in diameter (that's spotting them before they hit Earth). Unfortunately, the asteroids that have collided with Earth in the past decade-plus were much smaller—and currently untraceable. Despite their small size, these bodies can cause impacts on par with city-leveling explosions.

The team lacks any mathematical model to estimate when we should expect one of these asteroids to strike a highly populated region on Earth, as opposed to oceans or unoccupied land. That makes Lu’s estimate of a cataclysmic strike within the next century tough to confirm. Still, Lu contends that his estimate is reason enough to get to work, especially in light of NASA’s inactivity.

“NASA has an Asteroid Grand Challenge, and that will excite students and citizen scientists, but that’s not a way to find hundreds of thousands of asteroids,” Lu said. “If they’re not in the dataset, you can’t find them.”

Find the rocks

Lu said that his team’s infrared satellite will use heat signatures to discover and accurately track many more asteroids than any current satellites can. Once B612's satellite launches and begins to orbit the Sun, at roughly the same distance as that of Venus, Lu said he expects “hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,” of new discoveries. However, when pressed by student attendees at the B612 press conference, Lu admitted that Sentinel has been designed with a design lifetime of "six-and-a-half years," which would cut into its discovery capabilities.

He later opined that NASA’s efforts to reach Mars were wasteful because of the problems with space radiation and that asteroid detection might be a better effort for them to undertake in the meantime. To that point, Jones had a lot to say about the other, far more lucrative possibilities to come from Sentinel’s tracking abilities: asteroid mining.

“We could catalog a million [asteroids] to promote commerce in space,” Jones said. “The greatest expansion in space that we’ll see in the 21st century is the move to take advantage of these raw materials—to create a thriving industrial park between the Earth and Moon.”

Money is no small factor in Sentinel’s development. Lu estimated needing more than $250 million to complete the project (“a map of the Solar System’s asteroid field will cost as much as a freeway overpass”), which he hopes to launch by 2018. When asked about B612’s current funding progress, Lu would only admit to raising “15 percent of the entire project” but wouldn’t clarify if that meant $37.5 million. (The foundation’s website has begun calling for public donations, but it lacks any transparency about the total raised thus far.)

As of press time, NASA representatives did not respond to questions about B612’s comments. (We didn’t reach out to the family of Antoine de Saint Exupery, whose The Little Prince inspired the B612 Foundation’s name, nor the creators of Scandal, which features a secret society called B613. We're waiting for your call, Kerry Washington!)

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